Anthony Riches - Arrows of Fury

‘Behind you!’

He pivoted, ripping the spear free of the fallen warrior’s body to find a pair of warriors within a half-dozen paces and charging in fast. Without time either to pull the weapon back for the throw or turn fully enough to use the blade, he dived forward beneath their raised swords, tripping his attackers with the spear’s shaft and rolling out from beneath their tumbling bodies to where his spatha waited, its point buried in the mud. Dropping the spear and snatching at the sword’s hilt, he sprinted back into the fight, hacking at the closer of the two, the sword’s razor-sharp blade opening the man’s head up like ripe fruit, then kicked the sword loose from the lolling corpse to parry an attack from his companion. Too slow. The man’s booted foot hooked his leg and pitched him to the ground with a thump, driving the breath from his body and breaking his hold on the spatha’s hilt. The sword fell uselessly to the ground beside him and the barbarian smiled at him in triumph, his sword’s point suddenly at Marcus’s throat with a cold bite that froze his attempts to regain his feet. Groping unnoticed at his belt for his dagger he found instead the tribulus given to him on a cold spring hillside far to the south and months before by Rufius and tugged the vicious little device free, forming a fist around its iron spikes.

The Venico standing astride him laughed down at him, lifting his shoulders and taking a firm grip on his sword’s hilt in readiness to ram the blade home into the Roman’s windpipe. Marcus was a split second faster, slamming his fist up into the man’s unprotected groin and spearing the iron barb that protruded from between his fingers between his balls and deep into the root of his penis. The barbarian threw his head back and screamed in agony, his sword dangling forgotten as he staggered away, and Marcus rolled to one side, scooping up the spatha and surging to his feet to behead the man with a single blow. He looked to his comrades, fearful of what he might find.

A mile down the river, the fight was slowly but certainly turning against the Tungrian detachment sent to cover the defence’s southern flank. Julius watched with growing consternation as the number of Venico warriors ranged against the three centuries in his defensive line strengthened by the minute, a stream of tattooed barbarians crossing the river behind them to add two men to their strength for every one killed by the Tungrians. His men were tiring now, their initial battle fury exhausted, and while he knew they would fight on for a good deal longer he could tell that they were no longer battling as hard as before. While the Tungrians were increasingly huddled behind their shields, striking out with their short swords when the opportunity presented itself, the Venicones, bolstered by the flow of fresh warriors from the mass waiting on the other side of the river, were gradually gaining the upper hand, growing in confidence as their strength increased.

He looked to the rear, peering past the stolid lines of the 10th

Century’s axemen waiting for their turn to join the fight in the mist, knowing that the rest of the cohort probably had problems enough that reinforcement was unlikely.

‘Another five minutes of this and we’ll have to start putting the Bear’s lads into the fight.’

Julius nodded at Rufius’s muttered statement.

‘How’s the boy?’

The older man glanced down at Dubnus’s prone form, his wound temporarily staunched by the bandage stuffed through the hole in his armour by a bandage carrier who had shaken his head unhappily and moved on to the next casualty with the hardbitten detachment of a man who had seen death and mutilation too many times before to be affected by anything as prosaic as a spear wound.

‘Still with us. I’d say he’ll pull through, if only we can get him out of here…’

Julius snorted, pushing another of his century’s rear rank forward as a front ranker went down with an axe buried deeply in his head, the heavy blade cleft clean through his helmet’s bracing bars and deep into his skull. The rear rankers to either side grabbed him by the shoulders of his mail coat and threw him backwards past the officers and out from under the soldiers’ feet to lie wide eyed and spasming intermittently on the wet ground. The bandage carrier gave his twitching body a cursory glance before turning back to the task of bandaging a wounded man’s arm, opened up from wrist to elbow by a Venicone sword.

‘Not much chance of that. We stand here and most likely we’ll die like rats in a barrel. Bear, get your boys ready to…’

His head jerked up as he caught movement on the hill above them out of the corner of his eye.

‘What the fuck…?’

Men were mustering on the slope to the barbarian left, perfectly positioned for an attack down into their unprotected rear. Rufius stared up the hill alongside him, straining tired eyes to make out the detail masked by the curtains of mist drifting across the battlefield.

‘It’s a century of our lads, although they look bloody odd to me. Scruffy bastards from the look of it…’

Julius laughed grimly, tucking his vine stick into his belt and drawing his gladius as the men on the hill above gave a guttural war cry and poured down the hill in an undisciplined charge that narrowed Rufius’s eyes with bafflement.

‘Those boys aren’t ours, Grandfather, you need a new set of peepers. That’s Martos and what’s left of his warband, wearing our kit and getting stuck into the Venicones. I might not like the man, but I’ll be buggered if I’ll let this chance go begging. Bear, get ready to attack to the bridge!’

He elbowed the trumpeter in the ribs.

‘Blow the advance, boy! Burst your fucking lungs!’

The trumpet’s call sang out over the riverbank, the notes stiffening backs previously bent to huddle into the cover of their shields as standard-bearers bellowed encouragement to their comrades. Julius stepped up to the line, motioning with both arms to the three centuries’ chosen men to put their poles to the soldier’s backs and start pushing. He took a deep breath and roared his command, the bellowed words cutting across the sounds of clashing metal.

‘Tungrians, either we deal with these barbarian arse-fuckers now or we die before our time. Advance!’

As the newcomers burst on to the Venicones’ left flank in a flurry of hacking swords, the Tungrians took their iron to the distracted tribesmen with renewed vigour, spending the last of their strength recklessly as they saw their one chance to snatch victory from the certainty of defeat. As they stepped up to the Venicones with new purpose, hammering at the warriors with their shields before stabbing their swords in drilled unison, the 10th Century took their chance, trotting around the end of the Tungrian line and past the mass of enraged Votadini assaulting the enemy flank before breaking into two halves. Five tent parties assaulted the barbarian rear, while the remainder, led by Titus, charged into the Venicones still coming across the improvised bridge. Their already bloodied axes rose and fell in pitiless arcs, each blow chopping a Venico warrior to the ground in bloodied ruin. Attacking unprepared and unarmoured warriors from the rear, the forty men at the Venicones’ rear killed three times their strength in less than a minute, before the barbarians even had time to turn and fight. The warband, beset from the rear by blood-painted giants wielding their weapons with terrible ferocity, promptly lost all reason and threw themselves at the Tungrian line in a desperate attempt to escape, their abandon opening them up to vengeful soldiers who only seconds before had been suffering under their swords. With a sudden collective shudder of men at the end of their tether, the warband broke into a melee of fleeing warriors, pursued across the battlefield by soldiers and Votadini warriors whose blood was well and truly up, and whose only desire was to complete the slaughter of their mutual enemy.